No Easy Way Out by Dayna Lorentz

There are some books that you read, and you really just don't want to finish them, but because you are a dedicated human being, you force yourself to trek through the awful grammar and the cringe-worthy dialogue and finish. This was one of those books.

No Easy Way Out is a YA novel about a group of citizens who get trapped in a mall when a new strain of the flu gets them quarantined. HAVEN'T HEARD THIS STORY BEFORE HAVE YOU? Yes, you have. But I bet you haven't heard it told so horribly. There are factions of the mall who want to cooperate, who want to save their loved ones, who want to get drunk and kill all their enemies (no, I'm not joking--it's a thing), and then there are those who are going to "save the world and expose what their government forced on them". Ick.

Let me start by saying that I really wanted this book to be good. It looked like a fun, easy read, so I picked it up. But, I was unpleasantly surprised.

First of all, THE GRAMMAR. It literally looks as though a kindergarten student wrote this rough draft and sent it to the publisher, and the editor was hungover, so they just pushed it on through, and it got published, so now the rest of the world is forced to be sucked in to a book with a kindergartener's grammar skills. UGH. Frustrating.

Secondly, the dialogue is absolutely cringe-worthy. It is cheesy, uninteresting, and almost unbearable. The characters use words like "douche" and "bro" and "sup", and that is pretty much the extent of their vocabulary. The conversations are so underdeveloped that often times I had no idea how a single conversation was relevant to the plot line.

Third, the character development is awful. All of the characters were transparent and overused stereotypes. That's all I'll say about THAT.

And finally, the plot line is overused, and done very poorly. We all know the story, some kind of catastrophe occurs, and the citizens are forced to form a utopian society in order to survive. You know, The Hunger Games, The MazeRunner, Divergent? Yeah, same plot line, just with atrocious writing and editing. I kind of wish I WAS a kindergartener so I wouldn't have had to suffer through reading this horribly overdone plot.

So, as you can tell, I hated this book. And you know that I'm not going to recommend it.

xoxo